Tag: conference

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the 2018 Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference (FEMTC). It was hosted by Thunderhead Engineering and held in Gaithersburg, Maryland, right around the corner from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This three day event spanning from October 1st to 3rd was a single-track agenda which allowed participants to watch all presentations and engage with all speakers. Attendees ranged from engineers to geo-scientists to researchers and a few students. The presentations were a fantastic balance between technical material and more high-level fire and modeling topics. I presented on the first day on stadium egress modeling our team has been conducting over the past year in collaboration with ARUP. The open access version of the paper can be found here and the presentation video at the bottom of this blog post. Our research was well-received and represents stage one of the project, in which stage two will be built upon over the next eight months. One of my favourite aspects of the conference included the fact that many of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) software developers were in attendance. Since many of the presentations were geared towards certain aspects of FDS, a lot of the Q&A periods not only consisted of audience questions, but also of comments from these FDS developers of precise recommendations and precautions to take when utilizing FDS for specific purposes.

Presenatations will be invited for full paper consideration in the journal, Fire and Materials

Dr. Gales will be chairing the Workshop on Advancements in Evaluating the Fire Resistance of Structures to be held Thursday December 6th and Friday December 7th, 2018. This workshop is sponsored by ASTM Committee E05 on Fire Standards and will be held at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the December standards development meetings of the committee. The workshop will celebrate the centennial of the furnace temperature-time curve, which defines the thermal fire exposure conditions in ASTM E119 and other fire resistance test standards.

We have an exciting two weeks ahead. The research team will be visiting 4 conferences in the coming weeks to present 6 presentations. In addition we will have a 7th presented at ASFE and this will be announced at a later date. The below are brief descriptions of each. Open access versions will appear at a later date.

CSCE Symposium in Vancouver (May 31st to June 3rd)

Mass Heritage Timber Performance in Fire presented by Arlin Otto. The paper looks at a comparison of timber performance in fire of three unique types of timbers. The paper will also discuss adhesive bleeding seen in LVL panels .

A one day symposium was held in Kingston, Ontario for students to practice their presentations just prior to the 2015 Protect workshop

Last week myself, and some stellar students working with me, attended the Fifth International Workshop on Performance, Protection & Strengthening of Structures under Extreme Loading held at Michigan State University organised by Drs. Kodur and Banthia. The workshop would be what I would consider one of the more major extreme event (structural fire being my focus) research gatherings in North America this year. Attended by delegates from nearly thirty countries, the workshop offered a good level of discussion and the potential for future collaborations. Nearly 120 papers can be found in the workshop’s proceedings. I felt the key note presentations were exemplars and lived up to their billing. Each being a good level of thought and presenting detailed information and advancements for practitioners to consider. If I had any criticism to share, I would have preferred a bit more time for discussion for some presentations, however; that said, some presentations did invoke further discussion during breaks where they dealt with challenging problems our fire community faces. The best touch of the workshop I think was the river cruise the first night there. Overall the workshop was well organised, stimulating, and above all enjoyable. It was great to see colleagues that I haven’t seen in years to discuss life and research.

At the conference members of my research team (and my collaborators) put forward three papers: Material Characteristics of Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) Bars at High Temperature led by Hamze Hajiloo; Post-Fire Investigations of Prestressed Concrete Structures led by Lucie Robertson; and Structural Fire Design for Composite Steel Deck Construction in Canada led by Matt Smith. With this number of presentations there was a necessity to practice. With the assistance and participation of Mark Green of Queens University, and Holly Smith of Edinburgh University (United Kingdom), we organised a short one day symposium in Kingston a few days before the workshop. This is something I think we need to push more in Canada. In the United Kingdom there are multiple forums which are available for students to present their fire research before conferences and receive valuable feedback that they can incorporate in their work. The more important view in my eyes is that graduate students receive feedback from multiple professors and their peers. And such an opportunity to engage in a symposium with three universities, industry reps and a dozen graduate students from several universities was too valuable of an experience not to have particularly for the students involved. It is my hope that we can continue such efforts in the future like this to encourage this type of forum for our students studying fire engineering in Canada. This can engage our universities across Canada and strengthen collaboration. Maybe this student symposium is something we can grow in Canada and continue again next year.